Word: pronin
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...Yuri Pronin sleeps on a rough plank door liberated from a neighboring apartment and balanced atop heavy rusting water pipes in the tiny Moscow abode that he has called home since last December. The room has no electricity and no running water. A dented tin bread box and several empty jars serve as his kitchen, while a cardboard box doubles as chair and closet. The decor is Dickensian: bare, paint-chipped walls, splintering floorboards and windows caked with dirt. Apartments in the old Soviet Union were none too luxurious, but this is a big step down...
...Pronin's grim quarters are all too typical of the scores of derelict apartment buildings peppering the capital, where he and others live in squalor. They are members of the fast-growing underclass, made more visible by the demise of the Soviet Union and forced by Russia's economic revolution to live down-and-out in Moscow. Though many of today's losers would have difficulty surviving under any regime, the painful shift to a market system has pushed thousands of citizens, once able to maintain an acceptable living standard with the help of government subsidies and benefits, below...
Some of those falling through, like Pronin, do not even figure in official statistics. The Kaliningrad native moved to Moscow in 1989 after a dispute with management at the factory where he worked. He slept on the streets and at railway stations, and lived for a while in a tent city that was pitched outside the walls of the Kremlin for six months in 1990. "It's so hard to live these days. I am an invalid, and I have almost no means of survival," says Pronin, whose hollow-cheeked face and legs twisted by an accident he refuses...
...agents and informants, providing information on Soviet intelligence activities in France. He made several trips to Italy, which prompted speculation that he might have been investigating Bulgarian links in the plot to kill Pope John Paul II. Nut could also have played a role in uncovering Soviet Agent Victor Pronin, who was arrested in Rome the day before the French intelligence officer was murdered. Italian Under Secretary of Defense Bartolo Ciccardini seemed convinced that Nut's death played a role in last week's mass expulsion. Said he: "This assassination triggered a war between the French and Soviet...
Joseph Stalin ordered speedy preparations. He had Comrade Mayor Pronin address the citizens. Street-to-street plans were laid. Old women, small children and useless people were evacuated. "The breath of the front is strongly felt here," wrote Tass, official news agency. "A new line of defenses is being constructed. . . . People of the most varied professions have taken to the spade-women, weavers, streetcar drivers, students and teachers." Moscow changed within a week from capital into fortress...